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One to One: John & Yoko

When John Lennon was shot in front of his apartment at New York City’s Dakota building in 1980, Time magazine called it an “assassination.” Noting that the term is usually reserved for the murder of a head of state, the Time editorial board called Lennon “the leader of a state of mind.” Before his murder by a deranged fan, Lennon was a musician — albeit one of the most famous in modern history. Afterwards, he became a martyr. 

But martyrdom, it turns out, does not suit Lennon. Sure, they open every Summer Olympics with his secular hymn “Imagine,” but the Beatles Backlash is real, and Lennon’s legacy has gotten the worst of it. Sir Paul McCartney is still playing shows and wowing audiences at age 82. Ringo is still the floppy mascot guy he always has been (and, let’s be clear, one of the greatest drummers of all time). George Harrison’s solo work is now venerated as the best of the post-Beatles output. But spend a few minutes on any social media network these days and you can find people who say the Beatles were massively overrated, and, most cruelly of all, John Lennon would probably be MAGA if he were alive today. 

Lennon the iconoclast would have understood. A couple of generations have had the Fab Four’s music shoved down their throats by the Beatles industrial complex. That the band “changed the world” is a Boomer catechism. So when young people hear the music made by a bunch of moldy old white guys, of course they’re predisposed to hate it. 

In One to One: John & Yoko, director Kevin Macdonald aims to demystify Lennon and reveal the human being behind the mythical martyr. The meat of the film is performance footage from Lennon’s Madison Square Garden show on August 30, 1972. The concert was a benefit for the victims of the Willowbrook State School in New Jersey, which journalist Geraldo Rivera had exposed as a hellhole where developmentally disabled children were basically imprisoned and left to rot. It was the only full-length concert Lennon played after the Beatles’ Shea Stadium swan song in 1966. 

The shocking footage from inside Willowbrook is a part of the hundreds of clips from TV and film that flesh out One to One. Macdonald begins the story in 1971. The Beatles have been broken up for more than a year, and John Lennon has been living with his new wife Yoko Ono in a posh English country estate outside London. As Lennon recounts in a taped interview with a print journalist, Ono was the one who hated living in a mansion and wanted to simplify their lives. On a short vacation to New York City, Lennon and Ono discovered that they loved the hustle and bustle, and the cultural scene. Lennon tells the interviewer that he felt at home because “no one bothered us.” So the couple sold their English estate and moved into a two-room flat in Greenwich Village. There, they mostly smoked weed and watched the TV they had propped up at the foot of their bed, which had been left by the apartment’s previous owner.  

A couple’s therapist would have a field day with the picture of John and Yoko’s relationship Macdonald draws. The “Yoko is the villain who broke up the Beatles” narrative was exposed as misogynistic agitprop by Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back documentary series. Jackson found a sound clip where Sir Paul himself calls bullshit on the notion that the group was in trouble because “Yoko sat on an amp.” But Lennon and Ono were clearly codependent, years before the psychological term was coined. By the time they moved to New York, they had both gotten hooked on heroin and kicked the habit. Lennon was tired of being a prisoner of his own fame and fascinated by the avant-garde art world which had embraced Ono, whom he called a “creative genius.” (One of the film’s running gags involves taped conversations between Ono’s staff who are trying desperately to secure a thousand house flies for one of Ono’s art installations.) In a clip from one of the panel-type talk shows that was popular on TV at the time, Lennon opens up about being abandoned by his mother and reconnecting at age 16, only months before she was hit by a truck. For her part, Ono was the daughter of a rich Japanese family who had been made into destitute refugees by the American firebombing of Tokyo. It’s no wonder that two people with abandonment issues would cling so fiercely to each other. 

The focus of their lives in 1971 to ’73 was radical leftist politics. Ono’s feminism was a revelation to Lennon, who had been abusive to his first wife Cynthia. Macdonald drives the point home by showing footage of Lennon getting kicked out of the First International Feminist Conference, where Ono was speaking, for being the only man there. Protests against the Vietnam War were raging in America, and the Ono-Lennons were in the thick of it. They were planning an American “peace tour,” where some of the proceeds would have gone to bail funds for imprisoned Black men. Lennon tried to recruit Bob Dylan as a co-headliner but never quite got it done. He wrote a song about the Attica prison revolt that his manager begged him not to perform in public. In the end, the tour plans fell apart. Three months after the Plastic Ono Band’s MSG show, Nixon was reelected in a landslide, and his State Department tried to deport Lennon. The restored concert footage shows what might have been. Lennon and the band (which includes a bass player dressed as Jesus and a Stevie Wonder guest vocal on “Give Peace a Chance”) are loose and playful. Lennon delivers a transcendent version of “Imagine” at a piano while casually chewing gum. One imagines a world where, with a little more practice, they coalesced into a touring powerhouse that freed prisoners across the country. But that is not the world we got. 

One to One: John and Yoko
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Indie Memphis Announces ‘Intermission,’ Pauses All Programming

In an email to filmmakers sent this morning, April 4, 2025, the arts nonprofit Indie Memphis announced an “intermission.”

“Starting today, Indie Memphis will pause all programming — including our annual film festival — as we explore strategic paths forward for the organization. This includes evaluating potential partnerships and organizational models that can sustain our mission and community impact long term,” read the email.

“This decision was not made lightly. It reflects both the challenges we’ve faced and our deep commitment to preserving the spirit of Indie Memphis. We remain proud of the filmmakers, artists, and stories we’ve supported — and we’ll be sharing more about what’s next in the weeks to come.”

In addition to the annual film festival, which has been a staple in the Memphis fall events calendar for 27 years, Indie Memphis has also presented Shoot & Splice, a monthly program which presents workshops and forums for filmmakers looking to hone their craft; Microcinema, a semi-regular program of short films from around the world; the Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival, which helps high schoolers get a start in the art; the IndieGrant program, which funded more than 20 short films by Memphis filmmakers in the last decade; and most recently the Black Creators Forum, an annual conclave which brings together African-American artists and filmmakers from all over the country. All of those programs are currently suspended.

Indie Memphis executive director Kimel Fryer says this is not the end for the organization. “Indie Memphis has been around for 27 years. This intermission is to make sure that we are around for another 27 years because we are being intentional and thoughtful about what we’re providing to the community.”

Artistic director Miriam Bale resigned from Indie Memphis in 2024, and Kayla Myers took over as head programmer for last year’s festival. Fryer confirms that Myers and operations manager Joseph Carr have left the organization this year. Marketing director Macon Wilson had previously taken a position with the Orpheum Theatre.

Film festivals nationwide have been struggling in the current economic and cultural environment. First, the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered theaters and prevented in-person gatherings for two years, beginning in March 2020. Buoyed by government relief funds, “We didn’t slow down programming. Indie Memphis actually increased programming during the pandemic,” says Fryer. The nonprofit embraced streaming films with the help of Memphis-based Eventive, which was itself a spinoff of the festival’s ticketing system. The 2020 festival was entirely virtual, and all editions of the festival since then have had a streaming component.

But just as Covid relief funding was drying up, dual strikes by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG/AFTRA) shut down film production for most of 2023. The resulting disruption of the production pipeline has put the industry under stress. “The film industry has changed a good three times since I’ve been here, and I haven’t even been here that long,” Fryer says. “But this is not film industry specific. … For all nonprofits across all industries, corporate sponsorship was down by 45 percent.”

The Trump administration’s draconian slashing of federal funding for arts nonprofits, plus the increasingly uncertain economic environment, has hit all arts nonprofits hard in the bottom line, says Fryer. “It’s not just federal grants but all grants — state grants, foundations, and federal grants are all a piece of our revenue, and there’s a lot of ambiguity as to how a lot of that’s gonna work out. So this is really a way for us to think about how we can get stronger, how we can really utilize strategic partnerships, maybe in ways we’ve never done before, or maybe in ways that we used to do, and we just haven’t in a long time.”

“We’re not just a film festival; we are a nonprofit, thinking about sustainable ways for us to continue to thrive,” says Fryer. “Regardless of what’s going on, regardless of what might be happening with grants or whatever, as a nonprofit leader, you always want to be able to be in a place of being able to plan and move forward with this. I think we know what we need to work on. We’ve got a strategic plan, and we’re looking at a lot of different things.”

Citing the festival’s longstanding relationships with Malco Theatres and Crosstown Arts, Fryer says she believes one way forward for Indie Memphis is through new partnerships. “This intermission is also for us to think about partnerships with a lot of different organizations, maybe organizations we’ve partnered with in the past and maybe some that we haven’t. It’s a time for us to think about how we can come back in a way that is sustainable, strong, and serves our community — and maybe introduces us to more community members that maybe want to be a part of Indie Memphis but don’t know it yet. So I wouldn’t be opposed to any partnership with anybody, but I wouldn’t say a particular name at this point.”

Even the flagship independent film festival in the United States, Sundance Film Festival, has had to rethink operations. Sundance recently announced a move from the festival’s longtime home in Park City, Utah, to Boulder, Colorado — a decision that the Sundance organization had been pondering for more than a year. “I know that a lot of people are gonna be nervous and maybe even sad, but I really do think that this is a really a good place for us to rethink about how things are gonna be in the future, especially when you think about how one of the biggest festivals in the world, Sundance, took the time to think about what made most sense for them as a location, even though they’ve been at Park City since forever and they actually are moving to Boulder because it’s just a better fit for them.”

(Fryer clarifies that Indie Memphis is not considering moving. “Memphis is in our name!”)

“Yes, we can be upset or sad that there’s not gonna be a film festival this year, but at the same time, [think about] what new possibilities that it opens for us. There are some things I can’t talk about, but I think that being able to take a pause, take a beat, and be intentional about your next steps, that’s one of the bravest things that you can do, and Sundance kind of did that first. There are a few other festivals that have paused and then came back in a stronger, more intentional way, and it’s worked out for them. Indie Memphis provided 27 years of programming, and I do hope that, after going 27 years straight, there is some grace given. I think that if we’re able to think about what could be next, I honestly think that it might be phenomenal; it might be so much better than if we were to just keep doing the same thing that we’re used to doing.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Companion

The word “robot” turns 125 years old in 2025. It was originally coined by Karel Čapek for his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. It was derived from the Czech word for “slave.”

But no one is more responsible for our modern conception of robots than Isaac Asimov. In his seminal 1950 book I, Robot, he laid out the Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. 

Asimov’s stories weren’t primarily about “gee whiz, how cool would it be to have a robot?” — although there’s plenty of that. They were about the ethical dilemmas presented by the fact that we humans have constructed autonomous beings who we expect to be our slaves. 

But wait, you say. It’s not accurate to equate our relationship with machines, which are inanimate objects built for a purpose, with slavery, which is stripping the humanity from a fellow human. When I use a Roomba to vacuum the floor, it possesses no consciousness with which to experience suffering. But in the age of AI chatbots which give the illusion of sentience, that line is increasingly blurred. 

Writer/director Drew Hancock’s Companion is a descendant of Asimov’s robot stories. It is near-future America, and Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are excited about getting away for a weekend at their friend Sergey’s (Rupert Friend) secluded lake house. There, they hang out with Sergey’s girlfriend Kat (Megan Suri), as well as Patrick (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillén). Everyone’s supposed to be friends, but Kat seems pretty cold towards Iris. We also get the sense that Josh and Iris’ relationship may not be very healthy. He generally treats her as an afterthought, but she seems devoted to him. 

Then, one morning by the pool, Sergey tries to rape Iris when no one else is around. She seems confused at first, then enraged. She pulls out a knife and plunges it into Sergey’s neck. Iris runs back to Josh, covered in blood and tears. But instead of comforting her, Josh tells her to “sleep.” Iris immediately goes limp because she’s his robot companion.

Obviously Iris violated the First Law of Robotics when she stabbed Sergey. But she was in danger of being raped, which is self defense, as defined by the Third Law, except that there’s the pesky First Law exception. So clearly, something has gone wrong here. And by the way, where did she get the knife? Most people don’t bring weapons with them when they’re lounging by the pool. 

If it seems like I’m giving away too much of the plot, trust me that I’m not. Hancock’s screenplay has more than enough twists and turns in store. Even better, each plot reveal is grounded in the premise, surprising in the moment, and seems inevitable in retrospect. 

Thatcher is perfect as Iris, who is forced to grapple with the very Philip K. Dick-ian revelation that she’s not a real person, but a stunningly accurate fake. At first, she leans into the robo-bimbo persona, but gets more subtle and human-like as the story progresses. The other big standout in the cast is Harvey Guillén as a conniving houseguest with secrets of his own. It’s a testament to how beloved the What We Do in the Shadows star is that when he made his entrance, half of the people in my screening pointed at him like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme. 

Usually, January and February are the months when studios dump films that they don’t know what to do with into theaters. So maybe I’m just happy to see a good screenplay executed well during the dry season, but I haven’t stopped thinking about Companion since I saw it. On the surface, it’s a tight techno-thriller with a sly sense of humor. But it’s also hinting at deeper issues, not just about feminism and the nature of consent, but also about our rapidly changing relationship with technology. At what point does the Roomba deserve rights? 

Companion
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A Look into 2025

So, like, apparently, 2025 is around the corner. Around the corner of what? From what? That’s just semantics. And at the Flyer, we’re basically already in 2025. That’s just how our deadlines are — always working a week ahead, or maybe two days ahead. Because of that, we can see into the future. Not really, but here are some of our predictions/expectations/hopes for the new year in Memphis. 

In the Headlines

Police Reforms

It’s easy to predict that reforms for the Memphis Police Department (MPD) will dominate headlines at least in the early part of 2025. 

The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) blistering review of the agency said police here used excessive force (which included tons of Tasers and pepper spray), discriminated against Black residents, and used harsh tactics against children. The review came after the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of MPD officers in 2023. 

The DOJ wants to enter into a consent decree with the city. This would install federal monitors to watch and make sure reforms are moving ahead. But, so far, local leaders, including Memphis Mayor Paul Young, have said they don’t want the monitors for various reasons, including the fact that consent decrees cost too much money.

Young has promised to reform MPD in-house. Criminal justice reform advocates say they want the DOJ oversight because the police should not police themselves.     

The need for reform comes, too, as the city prepares to pay what could be a $500-million verdict in the civil suit to the family of Nichols’ for his death.  

Photo: Frank Gaertner | Dreamstime.com

Cannabis Fight

Cannabis will certainly be in Tennessee news in 2025. 

Rules that would ban smokeable products containing THCA were issued from the Tennessee Department of Agriculture (TDA) in January 2024. Industry leaders fought the rules all last year. A lawsuit on the matter was pending as of press time.

TDA says THCA goes over the legal THC limit when it’s burned or smoked. This gets consumers high, which is why a lot of conservatives don’t want “intoxicating” cannabis products. Their ability to get consumers high is why the industry says these products — allowed by laws passed by the legislature — are so popular and are a major portion of their business. 

Those industry leaders complained that bureaucrats, not elected officials, made the new rules. So expect legislation from the Tennessee General Assembly when they reconvene in January 2025. 

Pissed About Reappraisals 

Also, expect your property taxes to go up — maybe way up. 

January will bring a new property tax appraisal in Shelby County. And Shelby County Property Assessor Melvin Burgess began warning locals about this in 2024, maybe to try to get folks used to the idea. 

In an August news release, Burgess said data showed property values increasing. That will likely mean a “significant increase in tax assessments” for homeowners. And that means higher taxes. 

Add higher assessments to the Memphis City Council’s new 49-cent property tax rate hike approved in 2024, and it could mean outrage when those tax bills hit mailboxes. 

Photo: Ford Co.

BlueOval City

More concern and hand-wringing is likely on deck for Ford’s BlueOval City project next year. 

Expectations were high when Ford unveiled the project in 2021. The $5.6 billion manufacturing facility in Tennessee was the largest investment in the state’s history. Since then crews have been hard at work raising the massive plant on six square miles of West Tennessee about an hour from Memphis. 

However, global electric vehicle (EV) demand softened. While the automaker planned to begin production of its all-electric Ford Lightning truck here next year, it pushed production back to 2027. In that time, the company awaits lower-cost battery technology and a higher demand for EVs in general. In that time, too, worries will persist about the future of Ford in West Tennessee. Still, the company did pull Santa behind a Lightning in the recent Brownsville Christmas parade. — Toby Sells

MATA

2024 will be remembered as the year in which conversation regarding transit consistently found its way to the forefront. And Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) has faced a tumultuous year — from the revelation of the $60 million deficit that the agency had been operating under, to the route and staff cuts, to the entire board’s dismissal.  

The new board decided to pause proposed changes until February 2025. While this temporarily stalled one problem, questions over MATA’s future and leadership prevail.

On Tuesday, December 17th, the MATA board voted to continue negotiating a contract that could lead to temporary leadership changes. If approved, TransPro employees would take over as interim CEO, CFO, and COO for eight months. The proposal prompted several questions from board members, but they voted to form a committee to gain more clarity.

Looking ahead, the board will need to address the February 2025 changes which could lead to service cuts and layoffs. The agency will also need to identify more funding sources, while potentially welcoming a new team of leadership. — Kailynn Johnson

Political Forecast

The coming year happens to be the one year out of every four-year cycle in which there are no major elections scheduled in Memphis/Shelby County. But that is not to suggest that there will not be intense political activity. In fact, potential candidates for the county, state, and federal offices in the elections of 2026 will be working feverishly during the year to organize and declare their campaigns. At stake will be contests for Shelby County mayor, to succeed the term-limited Mayor Lee Harris, and for the 13 members of the county commission, as well as races for governor, the state legislature, Congress, and the U.S. Senate seat now held by incumbent Republican Bill Hagerty. 

Announcements of candidacies for these offices should be forthcoming early in 2025. 

There will be one more major attempt by Governor Bill Lee and his allies in the Republican legislative supermajority to pass comprehensive school voucher legislation when the Tennessee General Assembly reconvenes in January. Preliminary estimates are that this time the measure to extend taxpayer-funded private school stipends statewide has good chances for passage. Also to be expected are further efforts by GOP members to impose stricter controls (or more severe usurpations) on the law enforcement infrastructure of Shelby County. It remains to be seen if GOP state Senator Brent Taylor gains any traction in his effort to seek legislative removal of Shelby County DA Steve Mulroy.

Both major political parties in Shelby County will be selecting new chairs, the Republicans in January, the Democrats in April. State GOP chair Scott Golden of Jackson was reelected in December, but Democrats will be choosing a new leader in January to succeed Hendrell Remus. One of the major candidates is state Representative Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in November. 

The Shelby County Commission will face the new year not only with some last-minute updates in its funding priorities, but with a stepped-up formula for establishing a budget and meting out allocations. In an effort to adhere to previous commitments to build two new schools for Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Mayor Harris and the commission will be seeking means to compensate for lower than anticipated revenue aid from the state government. 

Both local governments may come in for support and new modes for inter-governmental cooperation through the aegis of a newly formed and privately endowed ad hoc organization called More for Memphis. But the mechanics and prospects for such an arrangement remain obscure, for the moment. — Jackson Baker

Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant (12) dunks the ball. (Photo: Wes Hale)

On the Roster

One year without playoff basketball for our Memphis Grizzlies is quite enough, thank you. A trio of healthy star guards (Ja Morant, Desmond Bane, Marcus Smart) and the addition of a towering rookie center (Zach Edey) have the Grizzlies near the top of the NBA’s Western Conference standings. Better yet, the Grizz are among the top scoring teams in the Association, averaging more than 120 points per game. Where might this take a franchise that’s reached the conference finals only once in three decades? Go back to that word: healthy.

Morant only played in nine games a season ago (he served a lengthy suspension before his shoulder injury). Smart only played in 20. Bane barely played half the season (42 games). The end result was a 27-55 campaign. Morant is an All-NBA talent, Smart a former Defensive Player of the Year, and Bane an All-Star-to-be. If they stay on the floor through April, Memphis could well reverse that 2023-24 record and earn a top-four seed for the postseason. Can the West be won? Five different teams have gone to the Finals out of the Western Conference the last five seasons. There’s no current behemoth that would be considered unbeatable in May. The NBA Finals at FedExForum? Let’s believe.

At the college level, coach Penny Hardaway’s Memphis Tigers captured attention in November with an upset of Connecticut — the two-time defending national champions — at the Maui Invitational, bringing enough attention to climb into the Top 25 (16th) before an upset at home to Arkansas State. Is this another fall tease like the 2023-24 season, the Tigers setting up an immense fan base for a middling conference schedule? The answer is in the hands of two more star guards: transfers PJ Haggerty and Tyrese Hunter. A pair of glass-cleaning rim protectors — Dain Dainja and Moussa Cissé — give Memphis something it didn’t have a year ago, suggesting a repeat of the winter blues may be unlikely. A December upset of Clemson on the road and a less-than-intimidating American Athletic Conference are positive signs for a return to the NCAA tournament.

There will be life after basketball season for Memphis sports. Baseball America’s Minor League Pitcher of the Year, Quinn Mathews, will likely start the 2025 season with the Memphis Redbirds. Another pair of rising stars — pitcher Tink Hence and infielder JJ Wetherholt — have AutoZone Park in their sights. The Redbirds hope to end a postseason drought that dates back to 2018. The club will open the season with an exhibition against the parent St. Louis Cardinals on March 24th.

On the gridiron, the Memphis Tigers will enter their 2025 season on a pair of impressive streaks. The program has reached bowl eligibility 11 consecutive seasons and has scored at least 20 points in 40 consecutive games, tops in the country. Antwann Hill, the highest-ranked quarterback ever signed by Memphis, will don blue and gray for the first time and hope to replicate the success enjoyed by the departed record-setting Seth Henigan. One nugget Hill could grab that Henigan didn’t: a conference championship. — Frank Murtaugh

Mickey 17

Coming Soon

It’s not so much that 2025 is getting off to a slow start as 2024 finished strong. Christmas week brought a torrent of new releases beyond the usual awards season crush. So you can spend your first week of dry January catching up with titles like Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King, directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins; the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet and directed by Walk The Line’s James Mangold; and Babygirl, an erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman. I will never understand the decision to release Robert Egger’s vampire creepfest Nosferatu on Christmas instead of two weeks before Halloween, but you should probably see it if you’re into that kind of thing.

It’s not until January 10th that we get our first new releases of the new year, and that’s Den of Thieves 2: Pantera starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. The next week things start to pick up again with Wolf Man, a Blumhouse horror reboot of the lupine Universal monster. One of Them Days is a buddy comedy with Keke Palmer and SZA, which sounds promising. The month closes out with comedy: You’re Cordially Invited starring Will Ferrell, Reese Witherspoon, and an alligator. 

In February, somebody learned the lesson about seasonal programming and scheduled Love Hurts for the week before Valentine’s Day. It’s an action comedy starring Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. On the holiday proper, we’ve got Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy and Captain America: Brave New World, a combo which is sure to provoke many lovers’ quarrels over Valentine date night viewing. Then there’s The Monkey from Osgood Perkins, so that’ll be weird/scary. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is a sci-fi Bugs Bunny feature aimed directly at me. Paul W. S. Anderson adapts George R.R. Martin’s In the Lost Lands

March comes in with Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan’s dip into horror, Sinners, and the Zambian black comedy On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. March 14th is a showdown between Steven Soderbergh’s techno thriller Black Bag and Avengers maestros Russo brothers’ The Electric State. Disney’s live action Snow White boasts a screenplay by Greta Gerwig and stars Rachel Zegler as the drowsy protagonist. 

In April, many of you will be dragged to A Minecraft Movie. I am eagerly awaiting Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson as a disposable space hero. Blockbuster season starts in May with Marvel’s first swing of the year, Thunderbolts. The ever-creative Michel Gondry’s first musical, Golden, bows on May 9th, and the millennials’ favorite ambient horror franchise Final Destination: Bloodlines follows on the 16th. The 23rd looks to be a showdown between Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch reboot. June’s looking stacked with a John Wick spin-off Ballerina, Pixar’s Elio, the How to Train Your Dragon reboot, and the long awaited zombie capper 28 Years Later. July’s got James Gunn’s Superman, a new Jurassic World film for some reason, and The Smurfs Movie. August closes out the summer with Freakier Friday and the Paul Thomas Anderson crimer One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. 

October brings Tron: Ares, but besides The Black Phone 2, looks pretty slim on horror. In November, we come back after the intermission with Wicked: For Good, and Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man. December will be dominated by Avatar: Fire and Ash. Never bet against James Cameron. — Chris McCoy

Yo-Yo Ma (Photo: Courtesy MSO)

Live Music, Ho!

A multitude of ways to ring in the new with live bands await you on New Year’s Eve. Growlers will host Blacklist Union, Line So Thin, and Josey Scott, erstwhile lead singer for Saliva who won acclaim as a solo artist with “Hero” from the Tobey Maguire-led Spider-Man. For something completely different, crooner Gary Johns will serenade Beauty Shop patrons that night, while Bar DKDC sports another incredible singer, Jesse James Davis, from big beats to ballads, not to mention the dance-inducing bounce of Bodywerk. For some Beale bounce and soul, aside from the street party, Eric Gales tops the Rum Boogie bill and the B.B. King All Stars shine at their namesake club. Or tribute bands can bring yesteryear alive, with Louder Than Bombs’ Smiths sounds at B-Side, or Play Some Skynyrd and Aquanet at Lafayette’s Music Room. Prefer freshly spun wax? That’s it’s own kind of live. Try DJ Funktual at Eight & Sand.

Once January is underway, our musical arts institutions resume their 2024-25 seasons. The Iris Collective will present the New York-based Overlook Quartet in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on January 16th, showcasing music’s healing powers through meditative practice. On the edgier tip, Iris’ March 8th concert at Germantown United Methodist Church, with guest violinist Elena Urioste spotlights works by Max Richter, Astor Piazzolla, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Meanwhile, Germantown Performing Arts Center will present the groovier side of innovation with bassist-composer Meshell Ndegeocello’s show, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, on January 11th. And Opera Memphis brings Carmen in late January.

The Memphis Symphony Orchestra comes out swinging with its tribute to the “American Maestro,” Leonard Bernstein, on January 18th and 19th, in a program culminating with his Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Another maestro will be celebrated a month later, when the MSO welcomes guest soloist Yo-Yo Ma February 25th at the Cannon Center of Performing Arts. 

On the more rocking side of things, early January marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Elvis Presley, and Graceland Live will honor it in style with shows spanning January 8th to 10th. Yet the venue has lately embraced some distinctly non-Presley-esque music as well, like the February 6th appearance by 21st-century rockers Theory of a Deadman (an Elvis reference?), experimenting with an unplugged approach to their heavy sound. The unplugged aesthetic will also be celebrated at the Halloran Centre’s Memphis Songwriters Series, with Mark Edgar Stuart welcoming Hannah Blaylock, Rice Drewry, and Raneem Imam on January 6th. Soon after, Sweet Honey in the Rock will bring the raw power of the human voice to the Halloran on January 24th. And speaking of powerful voices, Mary J. Blige will appear “For My Fans” — like some of us who saw her in 1995— at the FedExForum on February 2nd.

But what’s a mere human voice compared to The Man-Machine? Many are laser-focused on Kraftwerk taking over the Overton Park Shell on March 25th. For the Wo-Man-Machine, see the twin-goddess cyber-hybrid multimedia of Marcella Simien and Talibah Safiya at Crosstown Theater January 25th. For everything in between, scan our weekly After Dark listings to see the artists making it happen in our thriving smaller clubs every day. — Alex Greene  

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Film Features Film/TV

Southeastern Film Critic’s Association Names 2024 Award Winners

Eighty members of the Southeastern Film Critic’s Association have voted Anora as the best film of 2024. The organization polls its members, including this columnist, annually to determine the 10 best films of the year, and award outstanding acting performances, as well as awards for writing and directing.

It was a contentious year for the critics.The closest category in this year’s balloting was for Best Documentary. With only two ballots left to be tabulated, the category was a three-way tie between Will & Harper, Sugarcane, and Super/Man the Christopher Reeve Story. When the final two votes were added, Sugarcane, an investigation into the Canadian Indian residential school system by directors Julian Brave, NoiseCat, and Emily Cassie, took the crown.

Another close result resulted in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow just missing the top 10. The acclaimed A24 film about a TV show’s increasingly creepy fandom was narrowly edged out by James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, which hits theaters on Christmas Day.

“Every year we hear from the naysaying sectors of the industry that it wasn’t a very good year for film,” says Scott Phillips, President of SEFCA and writer for Forbes.com. “This slate of winners easily disproves that statement for 2024.

“Between theatrical distribution and streaming, releases can be a bit scattered and hard to find, but if you take the time to find the better films of 2024, they form a potent lineup. We hope that film fans out there can use our Top 10 list to catch up on some of the best that 2024 had to offer.”

Look for my Best of 2024 in next week’s issue of the Memphis Flyer. Meanwhile, here are the complete results of the SEFCA’s poll.

SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2024

  1. Anora
  2. The Brutalist
  3. Conclave
  4. Dune Part 2
  5. Challengers
  6. Nickel Boys
  7. Sing Sing
  8. Wicked
  9. The Substance
  10. A Complete Unknown
    Runner-Up: I Saw the TV Glow

Best Actor
Winner: Adrian Brody, The Brutalist
Runner-Up: Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

Best Actress
Winner: Mikey Madison, Anora
Runner-Up: Demi Moore, The Substance

Best Supporting Actor 
Winner: Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
Runner-Up: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

Best Supporting Actress:
Winner: Ariana Grande, Wicked
Runner-up: Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez

Best Ensemble
Winner: Conclave
Runner-Up: Sing Sing

Best Director
Winner: Brady Corbet, The Brutalist
Runner-Up: Sean Baker, Anora

Best Original Screenplay
Winner: Sean Baker, Anora
Runner-Up: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist
 
Best Adapted Screenplay
Winner: Peter Straughan, Conclave
Runner-Up: RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes, Nickel Boys

Best Documentary
Winner: Sugarcane
Runner-Up: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

Best Animated Film
Winner: The Wild Robot
Runner-Up: Flow

Best Foreign Language Film
Winner: Emilia Perez
Runner-Up: The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Best Cinematography
Winner: Grieg Fraser, Dune Part 2
Runner-Up: Jarin Blaschke, Nosferatu

Best Score
Winner: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Challengers
Runner-Up: Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist

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Fight Night

In March 1966, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam War, citing his Islamic faith as a reason and claiming conscientious objector status. At the peak of his boxing career, he was banned from the sport and spent the next four years in and out of the courtroom. In October 1970, he was finally granted a license to fight in Georgia, and on October 26th, he faced Jerry “The Bellflower Bomber” Quarry in Atlanta. In front of a sellout crowd, Ali took Quarry down in only three rounds, setting off a night of celebration in Atlanta’s Black community. At one infamous party, a group of Black gangsters celebrating the victory were set up and robbed at gunpoint by another group of Black gangsters, setting off a chain reaction of botched reprisals and mutual misunderstandings worthy of a Coen Brothers movie. 

Years later, journalist Jeff Keating, writing for the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing, discovered that the person who threw the party, an ambitious hustler known as Chicken Man, was not killed, as had long been reported, but instead had survived the ordeal and was living under an assumed name in Atlanta. Keating recounted the too-weird-to-be-true story in his true crime podcast Fight Night. Released in 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a huge hit. Writer/producer Shaye Ogbonna and comedian Kevin Hart pitched the story to Universal Television, who ultimately ordered an eight-part limited series for their new streaming service Peacock. 

Craig Brewer poses at the Fight Night premiere in New York City (Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Peacock)

One of the first calls they made was to Memphis director Craig Brewer. “I got this job the old-fashioned way,” he says. “I got a call from my agents saying that [executive producer] Will Packer and Kevin Hart wanted to meet with me on a project. … Shaye, the creator, has been a fan of my films, particularly Hustle & Flow, which he saw in Atlanta.” 

Brewer was intrigued by the story and impressed with the rough drafts of the first two episodes, which were all that existed at the time. “I remember reading the script and thinking to myself, ‘This guy Shaye and I, I think are gonna really get along.’ We have the same interests in movies and TV and music. But more importantly, it’s something I always remember John Singleton talking to me about: ‘Is there regional specificity to this voice?’ And I was like, yeah, this feels like a guy from the South, in Atlanta, making movies from his heart, his culture, and his experience. It felt real to me; it felt furnished and honest and, above all, exciting.”

Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist was on its way to the screen. 

Putting the Team Together

Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat and Will Packer Media had produced the podcast, says Brewer. “Kevin was always going to be Chicken Man. That was from the jump. Then I came on and we started putting together the other cast members.” 

Kevin Hart stars as Chicken Man, the small-time hustler who gets in over his head in Fight Night.  (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)

Samuel L. Jackson, an acting legend who Brewer worked with in 2006’s Black Snake Moan, was quickly cast as New York gangster Frank Moten. Taraji P. Henson, who was the breakout star of Hustle & Flow, came onboard as Vivian, Chicken Man’s partner in crime. “She was always at the top of the list,” says Brewer. “Then Will Packer called me and said, ‘We gotta go get your boy Terrence.’” 

Jackson as Moten ignores the press before the big fight. (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)

The producers thought Terrence Howard, star of Hustle & Flow, would be perfect for gangster Richard “Cadillac” Wheeler. “I’m speaking to you from New Jersey, so I’m speaking to you from Cadillac Richie’s territory,” says Brewer.

After Hustle, Brewer had directed Henson and Howard in the hit TV series Empire. “I called up Terrence, and I was kinda talking him into doing the show. I said to him, ‘Listen, it’s me. I’m gonna let you get up on that tight rope like you usually do. I’ll be your net. What I want you to do is bring your creativity to this and create this character because he’s an important character as the series goes on. I’m gonna just agree to anything you wanna do and help you get it.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I wanna look like one of the Bee Gees. That’s what I wanna do.’ I just remember feeling like, ‘Oh no, what is this gonna look like?’ But then he showed up, and I thought, ‘This cat is gonna steal this show because he looks amazing. … I don’t know if he’s gonna take it off ever again.’” 

The final big get for the cast was Don Cheadle. The actor/director was on Brewer’s bucket list. “I have always wanted to work with Don, and it was everything that I could have dreamed for and more. He’s a great actor, yes. But I would say that with him — and I would put Sam Jackson in the same category — you’re not just getting somebody’s acting talent, you’re getting their experience of making, watching, and living the art of storytelling. They have an eye for things that some younger actors do not have. Are we telling the right story? They make you better because they hold you to a standard of making sure that you’re doing right, not only by their character, but how their character interacts with everybody. So there were countless times that Don Cheadle would take me and Shaye off into his trailer, and we would work a scene. By the time we left the trailer, Shaye and I would look at each other and just go, ‘Man, the scene is just so much better!’” 

Fight Night is filled with star power, in a way very few TV shows have ever been. “The thing about movie stars is, they are decided by the people,” says Brewer. “This show is packed with five movie stars.” 

Hotlanta

Fight Night was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. The series features extensive location shoots among the split-level ranch houses of the suburbs and in the dense city center. Crucial scenes were shot in the distinctive Hyatt Regency Atlanta, whose 22-story atrium influenced hotel design for a generation.  

“There is a crucial monologue in episode two that Sam Jackson delivers, where he’s talking about his vision for Atlanta,” says Brewer. “He wants Black people put in places of power, and for the economic future of Atlanta to be Black. It’s funny because you look at the monologue, and you can imagine if it were being said in 1970 to an all-white audience, it may seem outlandish. But last night at the premiere, there were cheers because you realize that dream is here and realized. So it’s very interesting to talk to young people about Atlanta at this crucial time in its history, in the early 1970s, where they were on a campaign that I feel is comparable to Memphis’ history, and to Memphis’ present, which is to deny that you are living, working, and thriving in a Black city. It is to your own peril if you fight against it. 

“Atlanta is a city that is open for business. We’re too busy to be dealing with any of that racist bullshit. We’re here to make some money, and I’ll be damned if that’s not the Atlanta that I go to all the time when I’m filming these movies. This is my third project in Atlanta. I’ve been there the whole time that Atlanta has said that they wanna be the next Hollywood. And so many people saying, well, that’s not gonna last, or this is gonna be transitional, or the industry is gonna change. I am telling you right now, no one wants to call it out, but production in Atlanta is there to stay. I don’t see this returning back to Hollywood as long as there’s places like Atlanta.” 

Brewer had worked on episodic network TV with Empire, but Fight Night was his first limited series, a form that has become more common in the streaming era. Brewer compares the experience to shooting an eight-hour movie. Brewer directed the first two and last two episodes, and collaborated on the writing of the entire series. He describes the process as a mixture of careful prep and on-the-fly improv. 

“I got a call from Shaye saying, ‘We got this idea to do the scene between Sam Jackson and Don Cheadle in an interrogation room,’” Brewer recalls. “We locked ourselves in a room and banged out this scene, probably had it written by like 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock at night. Then, the following morning, I went down to the sound stage and there they were, doing the scene that mere hours ago we had worked on. It’s amazing how fast it all happened. It was just so special because there’d be these moments where Shaye and I would write something, and we knew, ‘Okay, right here, Sam’s gonna probably make this part better. So let’s move on and know that he’s gonna come up with something great to say here — and sure enough, he did! It was this great moment of watching these titans just being amazing.” 

Kevin Hart, one of the driving forces behind the development of the series, took the most chances. One of the best-known comedians in the country found a new lane as a dramatic actor. “I had a moment where I saw something that I had never seen before, and it kind of knocked me on my ass,” says Brewer. “It’s in episode two where Kevin Hart’s character is in grave danger, and he has to make a plea for his life. I’m sitting there at my monitor, and I watch Kevin make this tearful plea. That was one of the most real things I’ve ever seen an actor do. I remember just sitting there in awe thinking, ‘How could someone as successful as Kevin Hart actually have a whole other store of talent inside of him that we’ve yet to see? How can it be that he could drop everything that he is as the funniest man on the planet and actually be a dramatic actor?’ You make an assumption about a person, that maybe they don’t have this particular arrow in their quiver, and then suddenly they hit a bull’s-eye. I was stunned. Everyone was stunned. Terrence came up to me and he goes, ‘That cat’s the real deal.’”

Making the Music

Fight Night is set in 1970, a high point in the history of soul, funk, and R&B music. For Scott Bomar, producer and musician behind such acts as The Bo-Keys, that’s his wheelhouse. Bomar and Brewer have worked together on five movie and TV projects, beginning with Hustle & Flow in 2005. “I feel like I got spoiled working with him early on because he’s so musical,” Bomar says. “I find that the way Craig shoots, the way he directs his actors, the way he edits, it’s got a rhythm to it. I’ve worked with him enough now to kind of know what his rhythm is.” 

Bomar says he was in “summer home repair mode” when Brewer called him out of the blue. “He said, I’m working on this TV show. Theoretically, if you had this gig, would you be able to do it? Are you available? And I’m like, sure, yeah. I can do it. I knew it was a pretty quick turnaround, but I had no idea exactly how quick of a turnaround it was. I think there were people involved who had their doubts on whether or not it was possible to do what we did in the amount of time we did it.” 

Mixing engineer Jake Ferguson and composer Scott Bomar lent their talents to the series. (Photo: Chris McCoy)

Bomar and Brewer recorded the score to Fight Night at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis. They had one week to take each episode from concept to final mix. “I can’t say enough about my collaboration with Scott Bomar,” says Brewer. “It’s something that truly is a collaboration. I see the scene, and Scott and I start just kind of grooving to a beat, to a track that has yet to be written. We start with rhythm. It really is kind of a Memphis way of doing it.” 

Bomar enlisted several of his stable of veteran Memphis players, including drummer Willie Hall, who played on Isaac Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft.” Joe Restivo played guitar; Mark Franklin, Kirk Smothers, and Art Edmaiston contributed horn parts, along with Kameron Whalum, Gary Topper, and Yella P. Behind the board were veteran producer Kevin Houston and Jake Ferguson, who recently returned to Memphis after collaborating with superstar producer Mark Ronson. Most recently, Ferguson worked on the soundtrack to Barbie. “I feel like Craig came in and basically taught a master class on TV scoring,” Ferguson says. 

“It’s quite a bit different than film because the schedule’s so accelerated,” says Bomar. 

A 1970s vintage mini Moog synthesizer Bomar found in a closet at Sam Phillips Recording played a major role in creating the series’ soundscapes. In some cases, Bomar says they didn’t have time to assemble a full band, so he would have to play almost all of the instruments himself. “I’d say that this is the closest thing to a solo record I’ve ever made,” he laughs. 

“It was fascinating to hear Scott and Craig talk about Atlanta in the ’70s and all the inspirations they had,” says Ferguson. “Musically, it was so cool to see how we can take, quote, unquote, ‘modern instruments’ and make them feel like you’re back in the ’70s. When we finished the first two episodes, it was just incredible to see how much the scenes would come to life with the music we added.” 

“When we had the first mix, one of the producers said, ‘We asked Scott to do the impossible, and he’s done it,’” says Bomar. “That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten.” 

Final Fight

The first three episodes of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist premiered on Peacock Thursday, September 5th. New episodes will drop every Thursday for the next five weeks. The night before it hit streaming, there was a star-studded premiere at Lincoln Center in New York City. I interviewed Brewer the next morning, as he was beginning preparations for his next project, a film he wrote called Song Sung Blue starring Hugh Jackman. The director was still reeling from the reception to Fight Night. “When you’re dealing with a brand like Will Packer and Kevin Hart, that means it’s gonna be a party. You can’t just do wine and cheese and a floral arrangement. There were dancers dressed in some of the outfits from the show. There was a Cadillac in the middle of the dance floor. It’s just a party and everybody was there! My son [Graham], I had to pull his ass off the dance floor last night at like 1 a.m., saying, ‘I gotta work, son! Let’s go!’ But he was out there, doing the wobble with everybody else. … It was such a great thing to see it with a crowd. Yeah, I think we got a great show here.” 

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Borderlands

“Zero percent! You don’t see that very often!” 

That’s Claptrap (Jack Black), the robot in Borderlands, after being asked to calculate the odds of surviving an encounter with some Psychos in the Caustic Caverns beneath Pandora. 

Coincidentally, “zero percent” was Borderlands score on Rotten Tomatoes when I checked it last weekend.

I only get preview screenings on very rare occasions these days. (Is it something I said? Knowing me, it probably was.) I usually don’t read any other critics before I watch a film for review. Like most pros, I have a love-hate relationship with Rotten Tomatoes. On the one hand, a congregator for reviews seems like a good idea. On the other hand, the site has reduced many people’s relationship with cinema culture and film criticism to a single statistical number, derived through means that sound scientific on the surface but are in fact quite dicey. On the third hand, they did invite me to contribute my reviews and remind me when I forget. So at least someone is paying attention to me! 

This week, I was trying to decide between It Ends With Us, based on a romance novel by Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author of the decade, and Borderlands, based on a video game series I was vaguely familiar with. Word on the socials was that Borderlands was an epic stinker, so I glanced at the RT score. Zero percent is, like the robot says, not something you see very often. It’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 territory. Now, my choice was clear. 

An RT goose egg doesn’t scare me. I saw Highlander II: The Quickening in the theater. Voluntarily. I had to see what was so bad about Borderlands. Maybe director Eli Roth would turn the aesthetic corner and create a film so bad it’s good! As a frequent flyer at Black Lodge Shitfest, I appreciate a good trainwreck. For me, the last so-bad-its-good pic — what the SubGenius community calls badfilm — was Gods of Egypt. It’s got everything: Geoffrey Rush phoning it in as the sun god Ra! Chadwick Boseman solving the riddle of the sphinx! Tiny Courtney Eaton! I can’t look away. 

Gods of Egypt got 14 percent “good” reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Checking RT as I write this, after opening weekend, Borderlands has soared to 8 percent. The positive notices come mostly from sources that aren’t exactly cinematic tastemakers — like Polygon, who praise anything related to video games.

So how bad is Borderlands? I regret to inform you, it is a very bad film, but not badfilm. Borderlands the game is a first-person shooter released in 2009. Even the original was excessively derivative. Pandora, the planet on which the action takes place, shares a name with the homeworld of Avatar’s Na’vi, but it looks like Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic Australia. More accurately, it looks like Fallout, the classic video game from 1988 whose developers were among the first people to adapt George Miller’s outback junkyard aesthetic. It’s also the second film I’ve seen this year to rip off Miller’s Furiosa, the first being Deadpool & Wolverine. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, give Furiosa a chance.) 

The star of the show is Cate Blanchett as Lilith, one of four playable characters from the original Borderlands. Blanchett is cursed with a stiff red hairdo that, for badfilm aficionados, will bring up memories of Frances McDormand’s fright wig in Æon Flux. Lilith is a space bounty hunter who’s “getting too old for this shit.” When she’s offered a very impressive sum by Atlas (Édgar Ramírez) to rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from rogue trooper Roland (Kevin Hart), who has taken her to Pandora, she responds by killing the messenger. Literally. 

After hooking up with Claptrap, the mandatory R2-D2 figure, Lilith finds Tiny Tina, who has befriended another playable character, Krieg (Florian Munteanu). He is a renegade Psycho, the oh-so creatively named legion of canon fodder every first-person shooter needs. After evading Atlas’ goon squad, they end up at, what else, a crazy frontier bar owned by Mad Moxxi (Gina Gershon). There, they meet Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis, feathering her 401(k)), an archeologist who knows the way to the Vault, the lost alien treasure repository that is Pandora’s only tourist attraction. (Get it? Pandora’s Box? It wasn’t funny in 2009, either.) 

Borderlands’ vibes feel as mercenary as the characters. Blanchett, who may be physically incapable of giving a bad performance, hits her marks and sneers. Hart and Curtis seem to be devoted to expending as little energy as possible. Ramírez delivers not one but two slow claps. Greenblatt’s screen presence is like nails on a chalkboard. Badfilm legend Gershon, of Cocktail and Showgirls fame, brings the same vacuous energy here. 

Borderlands channels all of the worst tics from the two decades of mediocre blockbuster cinema. It’s got that flat Marvel lighting; characters who appear just to check a box on some Reddit filmbro’s wish list, then disappear without a trace; hyper-violent yet listless action sequences; an off-putting sadistic streak; and the kind of quippy dialogue that would cause Joss Whedon to yell at an entire writer’s room. (Credited writer Joe Crombie is a pseudonym. At least eight other writers reportedly worked on the script, but none of them would put their name on it.) Everything about Borderlands reminded me of, and made me wish I was watching, another, better movie. 

Anyway, I hear It Ends With Us is okay. 

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Zaire Love’s Award-Winning Documentary “Slice” Premieres Online

Memphis filmmaker Zaire Love’s confidence was boosted when she won both the Best Narrative Short and the Best Documentary Short awards at Indie Memphis 2023. It was a feat that had never been equalled in the 25 year history of the festival. “On a personal level, it really showed me that I can do it,” she says. 

For “Slice,” the winning documentary short, it was only the beginning. “We had our festival run in 2023, and we got into over 20 festivals,” she says. “We won seven festivals. And honestly, that’s rare. It is rare that you get into that many festivals, and it is rare that you are winning or a finalist in it.” 

“Slice” is about a uniquely Memphis sport. Think of it as the aquatic equivalent of jookin — acrobatic dives that are unlike the highly technical aerial maneuvers you’ll see at the Paris Olympics over the next two weeks. “Rico [the subject of “Slice”] says if you took somebody at the Olympics, they couldn’t even do what we do,” says Love.

For Love, the short film took up much more of her life than she had expected when she started filming four years ago. “I graduated my MFA program in 2020, and that’s when I considered myself what I wanted to be: a filmmaker. Right after graduation, I start this project that I’m thinking is going to be something that only takes maybe two weeks, and then I’m out of here. But it did take longer. And it has proven to be life-changing.” 

The truth is, most documentaries take longer to make than narrative films. “It’s a whole different beast,” says Love. “You can plan all you want, but in documentary, you really have to be able to pivot, because you didn’t know that you were going to get certain gems, certain really special moments that you can’t just file away in the archive. So you got to figure out how to put those nuggets in your film.” 

After gaining attention on the festival circuit, “Slice” was licensed by The New Yorker as part of their film series. It premiered on Thursday, July 25th, the day before the Paris Olympic’s opening ceremonies. “I learned that we have so many stories that need to be told, but I also learned to trust myself and trust my vision. Trust that me coming to a project with good intentions to, again, amplify and immortalize, it just showed me that I can do this. It really shows me that like Andre 3000 said, the Black South got something to say, and people really want to listen. So I just feel like it was just confirmation that this is what I’m supposed to be doing in life. This is why I’m here.” 

Watch “Slice” online at The New Yorker website. 

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Twisters

Legend has it that when James Cameron, fresh off of the success of The Terminator, made his pitch to 20th Century Fox executives that his next film should be a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, he simply wrote the name of the film on a whiteboard and added an “s.” Then he put a line through the “s,” so that it read Alien$. The execs immediately greenlit Aliens, which went on to earn the 2024 equivalent of half a billion dollars at the box office. 

One wonders if that story was on the mind of Joseph Kosinski when he went to Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to pitch his idea for a sequel to the 1996 disaster film Twister. Simply adding the “s” did get the film greelit, but Kosinski himself didn’t get the directing gig. That went to Lee Isaac Chung, whose last film, Minari, was an Oscar-nominated story about Korean immigrants trying to make it as farmers in Arkansas. (Don’t feel bad for Kosinski. He directed Top Gun: Maverick instead.) 

Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you that Twisters is no Aliens. Cameron expanded the original idea of “haunted house movie in space” into a knock-down, drag-out sci-fi action picture. Twisters just does the same thing as Twister, only with more tornadoes. 

But more tornadoes are better, right? Not if you’re from Oklahoma, like Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), the wunderkind meteorologist turned storm-chaser. She’s seen twisters devastate Tornado Alley too many times. Now, with her friend Javi Rivera (Anthony Ramos) and a group of like-minded grad schoolers in tow, she’s trying out a radical, new theory. Kate doesn’t just want to chase tornadoes; she wants to destroy tornadoes. Her plan is to launch barrels full of sodium polyacrylate — the moisture absorbing chemical used in diapers — directly into a tornado. The chemical onslaught will absorb the swirling water vapor which fuels the tornado, causing the funnel cloud to fall apart, and allowing the storm-chasers to live happily ever after. Unfortunately for both her dissertation and the continued health of her fellow storm-chasers, the tornado she chooses for a test turns out to be an F5 monster, but she only brought enough diaper goo to tame an F1. 

Five years later, Kate’s got a steady job as an NOAA weather forecaster, based in New York City. Javi shows up at her office with a proposition. He’s working for Storm Par, a company that’s using military-grade antimissile radar to scan active tornadoes, which they hope will greatly improve forecasts for their private clients. After initially refusing the call to adventure like any good Hero’s Journey protagonist, she agrees to get back in the storm-chasing game. Back in Oklahoma for the kind of “once in a generation” tornado outbreak which happens every year nowadays, she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick), a storm-chaser with a thriving YouTube channel, a tricked-out truck, and a gang of plucky misfits. Since Kate is on the Heroine’s Journey, she’s got two guys to choose from. Will it be her nerdy old friend Javi or the hunky “cowboy meteorologist”? And how many more will have to die before both teams realize Kate’s anti-tornado tech was on the right track? 

The answers to Twisters pressing questions are: 1. It doesn’t matter, and 2. Lots of people who also don’t matter. Sure, Powell’s jawline is so strong Tom Cruise could land an F-18 on it, but when it comes to romantic tension, Twisters is totally flaccid. Even though the tornado outbreak flattens farms houses, rodeos, and, in a nod to The Blob, a sold-out movie theater, this disaster movie is bloodless. Chung is a good director of actors, and Edgar-Jones, Powell, and Ramos give it their best shot, but they can’t seem to elevate the action into something I cared about, even when the bad guys are revealed to be disaster capitalist chuds of the We Buy Houses variety. Part of the problem is that Twisters is so repetitive. The opening scene with Kate and company fleeing from an F5 crackles, but it soon becomes evident that the intro emptied Chung’s trick bag. Twisters isn’t a bad film, per se; the Marvel era has produced much worse pablum than this. But it does commit the summer blockbuster’s worst possible sin: It’s just plain dull. 

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Now Playing: Emotions, Furiosa, and Frodo

Inside Out 2

The Pixar masterpiece gets a sequel. Riley, the runaway girl from the first film, is a teenager now. And that means a whole new set of emotions to deal with. Inside Riley’s head, Joy (Amy Poehler) is still trying to keep it together, as Riley enters the psychic chaos of high school. Now she’s joined by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopousos), and Embarassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Longtime Pixar creative exec Kelsey Mann takes over the helm from Pete Docter, who made the original an enduring classic. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

The Memphis Flyer’s own Kailynn Johnson says “Longtime fans will be reminded as to why this pair works so well together in the buddy-cop genre. Thousands of slap-happy think pieces and unsolicited marriage tidbits later, Smith is still refreshing, and we’re reminded of why the camera loves him. Lawrence’s comedic legacy precedes him, and his impeccable delivery doesn’t disappoint.” Given the $125 million the film has stacked up in a week, viewers agree.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

George Miller’s story of how the hero of Fury Road became an Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe is the most epic thing you will see this year. Anya Taylor Joy and Alyla Browne portray Furiosa in this 15-year saga of loss and redemption in post-apocalyptic Australia. The sci fi action is a feast for the eyes, but Miller never fails to engage the mind while rocking the body. Read my review.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Apes Together Strong! Ape No Kill Ape!

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy novels dominated the turn-of-the-century box office, and stimulated the imagination of a generation. Now the three films are back in theaters for a limited engagement in 4K and the full director’s cuts.